Google on Monday invited programmers into a new sandbox that will let them test out significantly expanded possibilities for Web gadgets, small applications that can be hosted on the company's iGoogle personalized home page.
The sandbox, available at Google's iGoogle developer page, lets developers get started with a number of new features that eventually will make their way to the regular iGoogle home page, said lead product manager Jessica Ewing.
Among those new features are a left-hand region of the Web browser that lets users navigate quickly through a list of gadgets, a "canvas view" that can give gadgets more screen real estate, and the ability to take advantage of some social features for gadgets that employ OpenSocial standards. OpenSocial is an API, or application programming interface, that lets a gadget run on Web sites, such as MySpace.com, Ning, Salesforce.com, and Friendster, that support OpenSocial.
For example, with the features, somebody using a Pac Man game gadget could both expand the game to full-screen size and, when not playing, use OpenSocial's notification abilities to hear when a friend beat the high score, Ewing said.
"It makes the home page environment a lot more interesting and engaging," Ewing said.
Google has Yahoo on the defensive, but Yahoo has a bigger lead with its My Yahoo portal site than Google does with iGoogle. Other home page sites include NetVibes and PageFlakes, which was just acquired by LiveUniverse.
Ewing wouldn't say when the new abilities would be available to regular iGoogle users. "There are no firm dates yet. We're hoping soon," she said.
More details are available on the Google Code Blog and an explanatory YouTube video.
Google's news arrived the day before the Web 2.0 Expo begins. The timing was coincidental, but no doubt Web 2.0 programmers will be interested.
This blog was updated at 1:00 p.m.
Yahoo is vulnerable in yet another corner of its Web network. Over the last year, the Internet company's personalized home page service My Yahoo lost ground to rivals Google and even upstarts Netvibes and Pageflakes, according to data from ComScore via TechCrunch. That loss came even after Yahoo updated its personalized home pages last March.
In January 2008, MyYahoo attracted about 47 million visitors, down roughly 6 percent from the same period a year ago, according to ComScore. In contrast, Google's iGoogle drew almost 22 million in January, three times its audience from a year ago. Google's growth puts the company second in the category above Microsoft's MyMSN.
Pageflakes, an upstart whose CEO was formerly with My Yahoo, and which is backed by Benchmark Capital, didn't register on the scale last year, nor did its peer Netvibes. But according to TechCrunch, the two companies now command less than 4 percent of the market for personalized home pages. That's still a small portion of the category for Pageflakes and Netvibes, and yet it shows that people are looking for new tools to improve their Web experience.
But for Yahoo, it's a similar story to Web search declines at the hands of Google, and yet another cut into its traffic.
Update: On Monday, Yahoo redesigned its My Yahoo personalized service with additional features. Like Pageflakes and others, My Yahoo now lets subscribers drag and drop modules of information (weather, stock quotes, and news) anywhere on the page. It also lets people change the background color of the site.
I got worried when I read early on Friday in this IDG News Service article about a glitch with some peoples' Google Personalized Home Pages.
Sure enough, when I went to the site, all my hard work creating a customized portal of news, blogs, quotes of the day, weather for San Francisco, alarm clock and Stephen Colbert video clips was gone and replaced by the old sparse, white page I used to have before Google began offering colorful themes for the top of the page last month.
I e-mailed Google to see what happened and was informed that a "relatively small group of users" were experiencing problems with their personalized home page. Lucky me!
Fortunately, the problem was resolved within a few hours, and I could get to the critical information I needed, like the Associated Press Odd News item about a bull ramming an 81-year-old woman's car in her garage in New York state.
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